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Sunshine was nonexistent on Kamino.
It rained, and it rained, and it rained. It stormed, mostly, but even when the sea and sky were calm, there were usually still heavy clouds above, drizzling a fine mist that never really stopped.
And on the rare occasions where it didn’t rain at all, fog rose up from the ocean, thick and obscuring the sky.
That wasn’t to say that Cody – or his brothers, for that matter – was entirely unfamiliar with the concept, of course. There were simulations. They were training for a war where they would need to be prepared to fight in all manner of environments. There were UV rooms, for the continued maintenance of their health – the Kaminoans may not have needed it, but humans, even cloned humans, certainly needed more of the sun than they could get naturally on Kamino.
So, Cody knew sunshine, to an extent. He knew its effects on the body, both positive and negative. He knew what the suns looked like in the skies of their respective planets. He knew the dangers of its glare as it hung low in the sky or reflected off their armor and equipment.
He suspected, however, that it was not quite the same thing as experiencing it.
It was an idle thought, and not something he dwelled on, more concerned with training and proving his capability as a soldier and commander candidate. Still, if there was something he looked forward to aside from fulfilling his purpose, it was that someday he would experience the sun for real.
He, unfortunately, was not deployed to the first battle, on Geonosis, a world that had no shortage of sunshine.
From the stories from those who had returned, though, there wasn’t much of it to see once the battle got going, too much dust and sand kicked up into the air, obscuring it just as much as the ocean’s fog.
Cody expected that such would be the case when he did get to experience a real sun for the first time. It was unfortunate, but that was the way things were.
But Cody turned out to have better luck than that, getting shipped first to Coruscant rather than directly to the battlefield. So he had the good fortune to actually have a moment to appreciate his first true sunshine.
It was quietly satisfying – more or less what he expected it to be like, the warmth of it, the shining reflections off the skyscrapers as dawn crept up on the city. There was a softness to it that he hadn’t quite expected – even the simulation lighting on Kamino always had a harshness to it, that the real sun lacked, while still keeping everything in perfect clarity. It left a lingering impression, and he wondered if other suns would rise the same.
He decided that, as much as the demands of war permitted, he would take a moment to appreciate the sunshine, if not the sunrise, on as many planets as he could. They all had to find their own personal indulgences, and this was Cody’s, only known to himself.
Or at least, it was, until General Kenobi asked Cody’s opinion on what color to distinguish the 212th battalion with.
“The color of sunshine,” Cody said, without hesitation. General Kenobi seemed unsurprised and untroubled by such an imprecise request. He did tease Cody with a bit of pedantry about how the different temperatures of stars and the composition of planetary atmospheres impacted the perception of their color, but he also didn’t press for any further details.
Somehow, though, the gold paint now in front of Cody was exactly what he had wanted, easily recalling the warmth and that satisfaction of his first sunrise.
And it was clear as day just how he was going to apply that paint.